bmfderek:I'd go so far as to speculate that because Truman made the choice he made, the destructive power of nuclear weapons was seen, and no one's used them since.

I agree. Unfortunately, too, with an enemy like the Soviets, we had little choice but to fight the cold war that we did, since it was a big, expensive game of chicken. Unfortunately, the Soviets are the last rational enemy we've fought under any definition of war. While our clashes with Korea and Viet Nam were ostensibly fought to prevent a Communist proxy from gaining territory and power, the fact that those wars were messy, brutal affairs that had little focus or clear plan of attack.

It also highlights, I think, the modern lack of resolve in achieving our objectives, and a clear lesson in what happens when traditional military doctrine clashes with political, social, or religious ideologies, and how incredibly ineffective fighting an idea with bullets and bombs is. Religion, politics, and social ideologies are the modern equivalent of the Hydra, and all we've done in every clash against such has been to keep cutting off the heads without killing the beast.

It's funny, looking at China, that it's taken no force of arms to begin the slow and inevitable decline of communism there: simply give the country enough wealth and opportunity, and such things go by the way-side for more open, free-enterprise capitalism.

The5thElement:George Washington was a southern plantation owner and owned slaves and Harry Truman authorized the use of a nuclear weapon. Twice. Both have Nimitz class ships named after them. What's your point?

To be fair, though horrific, the use of the bombs by Truman saved millions of lives and shaved a couple of years of exhausting and expensive war off of the Japanese campaign.

I don't believe nukes are appropriate as tactical weapons, or weapons to just throw out there willy nilly. But if my choices were to throw hundreds of thousands of bodies at a war against an enemy that was prepared to die to the last man and make the whole thing stupendously costly for us without any gain to be had, or simply using a single weapon whose destructive potential as a show of force is enough to make the idea of further hostilities unfathomable, then I'll nuke a goddamn town.

Also remember, towards the end of the War, Stalin and the soviets already saw the US as a threat, and had begun to contemplate attacking us. Using the Bomb on Japan not only stopped the Japanese in their tracks (and probably saved them from nearly obliterating their culture), but it made the Soviets think twice about open hostilities.

In the end, instead of fighting openly with the Soviets, we fought a cold war that was nothing more than a tech race that birthed a lot of good byproducts in terms of advances of medicine and science, without the loss of life, thanks to MAD.

So, yeah. I got no bones about Truman having a ship named after him. As for Washington, given the time period and all, I won't condemn him for being a slave owner.

Kit Fister:Rose McGowan Loveslave: Years ago I started a fan fiction where the new Enterprise E was a gigantic Carrier vessel with a bridge in the center of the ship instead of sitting on top of the ship like a big bullseye. I love the idea of a holodeck bridge with redundant power supplies, because those power supply units fall faster than red-shirts.

On a side note:God Bless you Enterprise CVN-65My Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

I think they already did this in Star Trek: Online. Several of the ships do not have visible bridge structures, leading one to presume that they have been internalized. Given that the bridge has absolutely no reason to be an obtrusive structure anyway, the damn thing could be on the bottom deck facing aft at the rear end of the ship just below the garbage hatch and still perform the same function (once the pilot got over the psychological weirdness).

Hell, in spin-off media they were doing that in 1975.

The old Star Fleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph Schnaubelt (a real-world naval architect who decided to apply real-world shipbuilding knowledge to Trek ship designs), the first major tech manual about Star Trek (and was used for background graphics and radio chatter source material for the first 3 movies before Paramount decided to say it was non-canon), had a projected future starship class called the Federation-class Dreadnought, which had its bridge deep within the saucer instead of being on top. One ship of this design, taken from the manual, was mentioned in the background of the first film in the radio chatter, USS Entente, NCC-2120

However, Roddenberry apparently liked the "bridge on top" concept, and stuck with it in later designs. If you hadn't noticed, he went with form over function in a lot of things, especially as he got older.

To come up with some rationalization for it, the production staff decided to go with the idea that starship bridges are modular, and can be detached and swapped out at shipyards as part of an upgrade to a ship or to refit it for a different mission. This explained the significant changes to the Enterprise-D bridge for Generations, and the substantial changes in the bridge of the Enterprise-A bridge between IV, V, and VI.

Silverstaff:Apparently at the Enterprises decommissioning ceremony the Secretary of the Navy announced that the new Ford-class carrier, CVN-80 will be the new U.S.S. Enterprise, the seventh US Navy ship to bear the name.

Link

I was there at the ceremony yesterday (technically not a decomissioning, an "inactivation" ceremony) and I can tell you the crowd reacted pretty strongly to that announcement. There was a lot of back-slapping a a few tears, especially from the older guys in civvies.

Keizer_Ghidorah:cptjeff: Keizer_Ghidorah: jayphat: I realize this is a gigantic nerd battle, the exact phrase "Deanna, take the helm. Get us out of orbit." And that is why I blame her. That battle should have been taken out into space. Alas, it wasn't.

She is the counselor, not the driver, and they were in a life-or-death fight, so that can be excused. Would you be mad at your friend who had never driven a vehicle yet you told him to drive the car after the driver has a heart attack on an ice-slick road and your friend ends up crashing?

Which goes to my point of, in a ship with a crew of 1,000 or so, them somehow not being able to get somebody qualified to fly a farking shuttle to the bridge.

Everyone on the bridge who could fly it was taken out during the fight.

Deanna Troi is a Starfleet officer with the rank of full Commander (same as Will). In an episode where Data goes missing, she takes tests in order to show proficency in all things related to command including bridge operations (which both realms of training would include piloting, that's one reason why Dr Bashir could pilot the Defiant and successfully fire the phasers to destroy a Dominion ship in DS9: The Search pt. 1). Her sudden inability to follow a simple command of "Get us out of orbit" is incompetence of the highest order (and a stupid plot device the writers used to destroy the ship).

Brick-House:Sad thing is, they're going to scrap her just like they did to the WWII Enterprise

The problem is, the way it's built, it's next to impossible to safely decommission the reactors and save the ship.

It's internal engineering is very, ahem, "unique". It was the first nuclear carrier, and the first nuclear ship of its size. It's got eight reactors in it. Most other ships have 1, other nuclear carriers have 2.

Those reactors weren't built to be easily removed. Unlike Star Trek, they can't just eject the core out a convenient ventral hatch. Nope, gotta cut through bulkheads and decks and basically butcher the ship to get them out. By the time you get all 8 reactors out (and sorry, they demand the reactors be gone to turn it into a museum, a pretty reasonable request), you've carved her into Swiss cheese.

They didn't build her with turning her into a museum in mind. That was a ship of the cold war. When it was built they figured there was a very good chance she'd catch a mushroom cloud, or at the bare minimum a hail of Soviet anti-ship missiles. Nobody was thinking that in 51 years how hard would it be to turn it into a museum, they were more concerned with just making nuclear propulsion work for a ship that big.

Brick-House:Sad thing is, they're going to scrap her just like they did to the WWII Enterprise

[media.defenseindustrydaily.com image 850x629]

They are going to need to cut gigantic holes straight through many decks to lift the reactors straight out from her guts and then scrub and decontaminate everything associated. A gigantic portion of her rear section is going to be an empty, gutted shell.

I'm all for keeping her afloat for educational purposes, but I can understand the hesitation since this is the first nuclear carrier they're decommissioning and are trying a bunch of things that have so far only been theory.

my ignorant white trash BIL served on the Big E. man is the finest example of Politics tab / Facebook horror Fark has ever seen. still posting butthurt about Romney losing. daily posts hating on Fartbongo, pro-Tea Party, at least 1 dozen colorful ghey Jesus Loves Me / Pray / Saviour posts with all sorts of artwork and sentimental crap poetry and such. yup, and posts galore about the importance of treating your children well too. sadly enough he did a real shiat job with the kids from both of his marriages. what a moran.

Apparently at the Enterprises decommissioning ceremony the Secretary of the Navy announced that the new Ford-class carrier, CVN-80 will be the new U.S.S. Enterprise, the seventh US Navy ship to bear the name.

RexTalionis:Let's hope the petition to make the unnamed CVN-80 (Gerald Ford class) the new Enterprise is successful. I'm optimistic because I heard that the guy at the White House is a Trekkie respects tradition.

FIFY

We've almost always had an ENTERPRISE. The Navy just isn't complete without one.